Every March, the nation pauses to remember Bloody Sunday — the day in 1965 when a young John Lewis walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and into the conscience of a country. The March 2025 issue of SOFU Lifestyle honors that legacy in a feature titled "Remembering Hometown Heroes," spotlighting the work of the John and Lillian Miles Lewis Foundation to keep Congressman Lewis's vision of civic courage alive for a new generation.
Lewis spent more than three decades representing Atlanta in the United States Congress, but his heart never left Selma or the movement that shaped him. The John and Lillian Miles Lewis Foundation, established with his wife Lillian Miles Lewis, carries that work forward by preserving the archives and civic history of the civil rights movement and by investing in the communities Lewis spent his life uplifting.
The foundation's programs turn memory into movement. "Lessons in Good Trouble" brings Lewis's philosophy of nonviolent resistance into classrooms, while the #JohnLewisSelfie campaign invites young people to make "good trouble" visible. The hip-hop musical Young John Lewis reintroduces the congressman's story to audiences who never knew him, and Good Troublemaker Neighborhood Grants and scholarships turn inspiration into tangible support for the next generation of civic leaders.
Lewis believed that education and encouragement were the most enduring forms of activism. Through preservation, programming, and partnership, the John and Lillian Miles Lewis Foundation ensures that the bridge he crossed in 1965 remains a path others can still walk today.
Read the full feature in the March 2025 issue of SOFU Lifestyle, and learn more about the foundation's work at jlmlf.org.
#PatrickTCooper #BeEncouraged
